“You kept it?” I ask. “And you wrote on it?”
“So that I remembered to give it back to you.”
“But I don’t want it back.”
“Too bad,” he says. With a sheepish smile, he reaches down to close my fingers around the note and then pushes my hand away.
I only shake my head with a laugh as I stuff the bill into my satchel by my side. I return to my latte, taking several long gulps, as does he with his.
Dean blows out air through his mouth as though his drink is too hot and asks, “Where are you heading next?”
“Probably just back home.” When I meet his eyes again, he’s arching a brow curiously at me. “As in here in Santa Monica,” I clarify. “Not Portland.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says as he gets to his feet. He grabs his coffee and presses the cup to his lips, taking a cautious sip before nodding out the window. He blows some more air. “Do you need a ride?”
I’ve discovered by now that there’s a benefit to being in a new city without a ride: you don’t have to ask, because people offer them to you out of pity. “If that’s okay,” I answer. I don’t have my license yet, anyway.
“Totally fine,” he says. “C’mon.”
I take a final drink of my latte before stuffing my earphones back into my satchel and swinging it onto my shoulder. Dean’s already made his way to the door and is leaning against it, holding it open for me as I step outside. The bright morning has dulled down slightly. I tilt my face up to the clouded sky in surprise. “Where’d the sun go?”
Dean shrugs as he trains his eyes on the traffic. “Contrary to popular belief, rain does exist in the Golden State.” He nudges me forward when there’s a gap in the traffic and we briskly rush across to the other side of the boulevard. I notice his car wedged into a tight spot, and I wonder how he managed to maneuver the car into that position in the first place. “It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a summer rainstorm that lasts for, like, an entire day. It comes out of nowhere and it’s super heavy.”
As he unlocks the car, I open up the passenger door and slide my body inside. “Rain doesn’t faze me. It’s a fixture in Portland for eight months a year.”
“That must suck.”
On the ride to my house, we talk about silly things like rain and snow and coffee shops and syrup flavors. I love caramel; Dean loves cinnamon. But my mood deflates when we get there and Tyler’s car isn’t parked in the driveway. I haven’t seen him since early this morning, and I’m really starting to miss him, however pathetic and desperate it seems.
“Thanks for the ride…again,” I say almost shyly. My cheeks flush as he tells me it’s no problem at all, and then a brilliant idea crosses my mind. It’s so great that I grin, laugh, and almost snort. I reach into my satchel and fish around for the five-dollar bill, my five-dollar bill, the one with Dean’s messy handwriting scribbled across Abraham Lincoln’s memorial. When I finally find the battered note, I place it on the dashboard. “For gas money,” I say.
Dean lets out a loud laugh and shakes his head. “Until next time,” he says. He salutes me good-bye as I step out and head inside the house.
Tyler’s car may not be here, but the Range Rover is, which means Ella is home. The house is silent as I advance down the hall. I peer around the living room door, and Ella is sitting cross-legged on the leather couch with a stack of photo albums by her side.
“So did you meet Ben Affleck?” I ask as I step into the room.
Ella’s blue eyes raise to meet mine while she shuts the album that’s in her lap. “Well, there were a lot of people, which meant a lot of cars, and so I told the boys I wasn’t paying for the parking fees. I dropped them off at their friends’ houses instead.”
I laugh and then nod toward the pile of albums. “What are you looking at?”
“Oh, just nothing,” she says quickly. “Just old photos. No one was here, and I thought I’d—I thought I’d grab them from the attic and look at them while you were all gone. The boys all hate it when I look at their baby photos.” She stifles a laugh as she glances down, brushing her fingers over the tattered cover of the album in her hands.
“Can I see?” I move over to the couch and push the albums over to make room for myself, and then I sit down by Ella’s side and pull my legs up onto the leather.
Ella looks almost nervous as she slowly opens up the album again and moves it in between us so that it’s resting half on her knee and half on mine. “These were when Chase was born,” she tells me.